St. John’s suffered its worst loss of the season back on Jan. 4, when the Red Storm was blown out, 77-60, by Georgetown. On Sunday night, in the rematch against the Hoyas at The Garden and recalling memories of Big East days gone by, the Johnnies dished out some much-needed payback.

“When a team beats you, as Georgetown did earlier this season, you want to come back and beat them,” said head coach Steve Lavin. “I think the bigger picture here is that the team is continuing to make strides in a positive direction.”

The Red Storm scored the first 15 points of the game and led wire-to-wire on the way to an 82-60 victory over Georgetown on Sunday night. The win was St. John’s eighth in nine chances and fifth-straight in Big East play, as the Red Storm moved into a tie for fifth-place in the conference after its well-chronicled 0-5 league start.

Not lost on D’Angelo Harrison, who dropped 24 points on the night, or his teammates, was the fact that Georgetown had beaten the Red Storm in each of their last six meetings.

“This group, we’ve never beaten Georgetown,” the junior guard said. “We’re going to celebrate it for the next hour, but we got to get ready for Butler.”

St. John’s (17-9, 7-6) was led by conference Rookie of the Year candidate Rysheed Jordan, who also had 24 points. The mark was a career-high for Jordan, who was an efficient 8-for-11 shooting on the night with a career-best three 3-pointers to go along with three assists.

The Hoyas (15-10, 6-7) didn’t get on the board until the 13:47 mark, when Jabril Trawick made a pair of free throws. The Hoyas were able to stay in it much of the rest of the way, even withstanding a 10-2 St. John’s run to close out the first half, to get as close as seven.

Georgetown coach John Thompson III said that his club, which turned the ball over 14 times, simply made too many mistakes to win.

“We have a very small margin of error,” Thompson III said. “Once we crawled out of the hole a little bit, we had a couple of breakdowns, which allows good teams to pull away again.”

St. John’s was due back at The Garden in less than 48 hours later for a Tuesday night matchup with Butler.